The industrial society of today depends substantially on a source of economical electric power. Most of these sources of electric power are not renewable and as a consequence, are increasingly expensive for the consumer. Additionally, many of these sources of electric power pollute the environment and are undesirable from this aspect. The pollution may include many forms of harmful byproducts such as smoke and airborne particles of harmful dust for example from coal burning plants and carbon dioxide from gas burning facilities. The coal burning plants use coal as a fuel which is provided for example by strip mining which can cause massive environmental disturbances. Electric power can be obtained from nuclear generating step plants. However, nuclear generating plants have created public hostility and fear, and in addition, these nuclear generating plants have experienced exploding construction costs and has an additional problem of disposing of spent radioactive fuel rods. Typically, the nuclear, coal-fired, or gas-fired generation plants require large centralized generating facilities with huge transmission infrastructure.
Hydroelectric power is environmentally clean to produce electricity but can be very expensive and environmentally disruptive to install. These conventional hydroelectric plants can only be situated on large rivers with sufficient flow and fall which is the distance the water must drop to build up energy enough to turn a turbine. Usually, hydroelectric power requires constructing a large dam across the river and a large centralized generating facility with expensive transmission network to transmit the generated power to the consumer. Necessarily, such a dam radically alters the landscape.
What is required is a source of electric power that is economical, renewable and will not alter the landscape to any great degree.